Network Gaming Patent Claims Not Invalid Under 35 U.S.C. § 101

The court denied defendant’s motion to dismiss on the ground that plaintiff’s network gaming patents encompassed unpatentable subject matter because the asserted claims were not directed toward an abstract idea. “Prior communication techniques interconnected all participants using point-to-point connections, and thus, did not ‘scale well’ as the number of participants grew. The Broadcast Claims are directed to an innovative network structure for the distribution of data as the number of participants in a computer network is scaled. . . . A non-complete, m-regular network is a network where each node is connected to the same number of other nodes, or ‘m’ number of other nodes, and where each node is not connected to all other nodes. . . . Defendants argue that the Broadcast Claims are analogous to situations such as the schoolyard game of ‘telephone’. . . . Defendants’ analogies do not present the same communication scaling issues as those that arise in computer networks. Defendants gloss over the claim requirement of a non-complete, m-regular network that is implemented on an application level. The claims require a specific and apparently innovative structure of message-forwarding, which none of Defendants’ analogies are known to employ.”

Acceleration Bay LLC v. Activision Blizzard, Inc., 1-16-cv-00453 (DED August 29, 2017, Order) (Andrews, USDJ)